Of all Android devices globally, 45% are now using Jelly Bean, the latest major update to Android (versions 4.1 and above). Only 31% are on Gingerbread (Android 2.3 versions). This is a big improvement over previous platform distribution numbers:

Three months ago, when we last covered the Android landscape, 33% of Android devices used Jelly Bean.

Last September, only 1% of Android devices were running Jelly Bean. And 59% were still running Gingerbread.

Superseded versions of Android are fading from prominence. Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread are still found on about half of Android devices, but they’re losing share and ancient versions like Froyo, Eclair and Donut are disappearing from view. These trends spell relief for developers who complained about having to support outdated Android versions.

(The expectation is that Android’s newest version, Kit Kat, will be released in mid-October.)

In reality, Google Play Services is much more than an app. It has broad permissions and effectively acts as a kind of quasi-operating system, allowing Google to introduce improvements without having to wrangle carriers and manufacturers.

Google Play Services is compatible with nearly all Android versions still in circulation.

This wouldn’t be so remarkable except for what happened two years ago.

Two years ago, after a remarkable multi-year run on the strength of a new video streaming business, Netflix stock blew through $300 a share for the first time.

Netflix, everyone was convinced, had discovered the Next Big Thing.

Netflix was on its way to becoming The Next HBO.

Netflix was going to disrupt and revolutionize the television business and make anyone who bet on it fabulously rich.

But then Netflix made a significant mistake.

Netflix announced that it was going to split itself into two different companies. One company would contain Netflix’s original DVDs-by-mail business. The other company would be the streaming business. Netflix was going to split into two companies, it explained, because the DVDs-by-mail business was a dying business, and the future was the streaming business.

Well, the market hated that idea.

Despite the fact that absolutely nothing at Netflix’s businesses had changed, the market destroyed Netflix’s stock price. The stock crashed by 75% in three months, to $65 a share. The company, some people said, was obviously going out of business.

But did the market conclude that the extraordinarily talented, brilliant humans who ran Netflix had just made a relatively rare mistake?

Nope.

The market concluded that the humans who ran Netflix were so unfathomably stupid that Netflix was obviously screwed.

That Netflix founder and CEO who had been lionized as a genius on the cover of all those magazines, for example?

!

Obvio usly an idiot.

Netflix was a terrible company, the market agreed. No price was too low for the company’s stock.

But now, a mere two years later, Netflix is up 400% from the low and setting a new all-time high.

How?

Did Netflix pull off some magic recovery?

Did Netflix introduce some revolutionary new product that no one saw coming?

Nope.

Netflix just did its thing–the same thing it was doing when the market threw up in disgust and pulverized Netflix’s stock price.

Netflix just kept investing in its streaming business.

And, just as many long-term Netflix investors had hoped, the streaming business has turned out to be a pretty good thing.

So, what’s the moral of the Netflix story?

The same moral as the story of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and many other excellent companies:

Ignore Wall Street.

Wall Street is so hyperactive and bi-polar, and so obsessed with meaningless short-term results, that Wall Street causes countless pretty good managers and companies to worry about all the wrong things.

Want to create the most possible value for shareholders?

Then start by creating the most possible value for your customers.

Put your customers first, and, over the long haul, your stock price will take care of itself.

Android Extends Market Share Lead In Europe (Kantar Worldpanel ComTech)
Android grabbed a 70% market share of smartphone sales that took place during the three months ending May 31, in Europe’s five largest markets, up from 61% of sales in the same period a year prior. It also has a commanding lead in China, the world’s largest smartphone market. Because Kantar only counts China’s richer urban areas, this data may actually be understating its lead there. Read >

Android gained in the U.S. market in March after three months of consecutive declines, increasing its market share slightly to 52%, according to comScore.

That’s still down nearly 2 percentage points from Android’s market share peak in November and is only up 1 percentage point from a year ago.

Rival Apple continues to pick up market share on the back of a strong iPhone 5 release. At the end of March, Apple accounted for 39% of U.S. smartphone users, up from 31% a year ago.

comScore measures market share by installed base, not shipments. It looks at U.S. smartphone subscribers over the age of 13.

Given the healthy growth of the overall smartphone market, however, Android still has 17 million more net users in the U.S. than a year ago. Apple picked up 21 million net users in the same period.

Microsoft‘s Windows Phone 8 operating system has yet to gain traction. Its market share fell slightly to 3% last month, which means it actually shed 200,000 net users in March.

Since its introduction in late October, Windows Phone has only added 400,000 net American users. Nokia is expected to release the Lumia 928 this week in the U.S. market! , which may help Windows Phone a bit, but we don’t see evidence of a turnaround yet.

Meanwhile, the overall U.S. market continues to see robust penetration growth. Smartphone penetration is now 58 percent, a 13 percentage point increase over a year prior, and an acceleration of growth. However, we don’t believe the acceleration is sustainable. Eventually, penetration growth will slow.

It is important to remember that with the rapid emergence of China, the U.S. is no longer as central to the global smartphone market as it previously was.

There are some caveats on this one which we’ll get to, but Apple had a really good holiday quarter compared to its rivals.

comScorereports Apple had 37.8 percent of the U.S. smartphone market for the three months ending in January. Samsung, meanwhile, had 21.4 percent of the market. Apple’s market share was up 3.5 percent compared to the three months ending in October. Samsung was up 1.9 percent.

As for the iOS versus Android market share battle, Apple was 37.8 percent versus 52.3 percent for Android. Apple was up 3.5 percent, while Android was actually down 1.5 percent.

This is good news for Apple, but as we said there are caveats:

Apple does very well in the U.S. It does not do as well elsewhere in the world.

The holiday period was when Apple really launched the iPhone 5. Samsung, meanwhile, was selling the Galaxy S III, an older smartphone model. It only makes sense for Apple to! experie nce a bump in this period.

We’ll see how Apple holds up over the next three to six months as the hype of the iPhone 5 dies off and the hype for the Galaxy S IV cranks into gear.

All that said, considering the Samsung buzz, you would have thought it was killing Apple. These numbers show that Apple can still hold its own.

When Google receives government requests for personal data, does it spit in the G-Man’s face or invite him in for tea and crumpets? The search giant’s transparency report reveals that, 88 percent of the time, the US will be able to rifle through your emails while eating baked goods. The States tops the chart, demanding Mountain View release information on 14,791 users in the last three months — with 3,152 requested with a search warrant, 10,390 with a subpoena and 1,249 from processes including EDPA court orders. The list of the top five nosiest countries is rounded out by India, France, Germany and the UK. Tour the report and you may notice that, breaking with tradition, content takedowns are no longer mentioned — Google is planning to break out that data as a separate filing in the future.

App downloads have accelerated since the beginning of the year. Approximately 10 billion apps were downloaded last year, up from ~7 billion in 2010. With ~10 billion apps downloaded through the first six months of 2012, downloads will more than double this year.

Alec Saunders, VP of Developer Relations, just took the stage at RIM’s DevCon gathering in Amsterdam to build up and promptly knock down a few “myths” about RIM’s state of health. First up, he tackled the notion that BlackBerry is a declining platform by saying that App World is seeing six million downloads per day, which is up 30 percent from three months ago. He also rejected the idea that BB app devs don’t make money, revealing that 13 percent of them have made over $100,000 from their products and that App World generates 40 percent more revenue than the Android Market. Lastly, Saunders said “we’re sorry” that RIM’s strategy has been “hard to understand” for “some people”, but added that BB 10 will solve that problem. He said that the new OS represents a “simple and easy-to-understand strategy” that is about combining the best of QNX and the current BB OS, offering consistent cloud services and making software that is both backwards and forwards compatible.

The results: Samsung is the number one phone manufacturer in the U.S. and Android is still the top mobile OS.

Apple did see its smartphone market share grow a bit, from 27.3% to 28.7% in the last three months. But Google’s Android platform is still crushing it with 46.9% of the smartphone market in the U.S.

RIM’s BlackBerry OS continues to flail, dropping to 16.6% of the market from 19.7% three months ago. Windows Phone is treading water with about 5% of the market.

Here’s the chart:

When it comes to hardware manufacturers, Samsung now has more than a quarter of the market in all mobile phones, including non-smartphones. Apple made a nice jump in the last three months, with the iPhone now accounting for 11.2% of the mobile phones in the U.S.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.